MorrowindReview

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Our final and comprehensive review of this huge, ambitious RPG.

By Barry Brenesal

Don't get me wrong. I'm a dedicated Baldur's Gate II enthusiast. I've played through the main saga and the add-on more times than I care to acknowledge in public. But you can only repeat Korgan's inventive obscenities or Jan's barbed whimsy so many times without thinking there must be a newer game on which to waste your life. For some while I've wanted something new, something equally obsessive in its own, particular way. Though I strongly enjoyed Gothic's dose of attitude and Wizardry 8's great battles, spell system and sheer fun, neither triggered the need in me to indulge in interminable stretches of gameplay. Both are excellent RPGs, but they couldn't open the floodgates of my imagination and haul me into their respective universes.

Morrowind accomplishes this. For me, it combines impressive scope, depth of focus, and a vivid, self-referential world culture that doesn't fall back upon AD&D or any other playing system for its content. It's the first RPG I've played in quite a while that leaves me bleary-eyed and drained at some ungodly hour of the morning, when I'd just discovered that the time for dinner had come and gone. Exploration, character configuration, questing and in-game activities (alchemy, enchanting, pearl-diving, factional conflicts and rewards, etc) are the best qualities of Morrowind, and contribute to the high rating I give it, and which it deserves.

In the Beginning...

You start the game in the cargo hold of a slave ship. (Morrowind is played in first person mode. Pressing TAB let's you switch to third-person, but it's next to impossible to fight while using it, and the static view from behind and slightly above your character becomes annoying after a while.) You've been kidnapped, and everything except your simple clothing has been removed. Instead of being sold, however, you're dropped off in the sleepy port of Seyda Neen, on the large island of Vvardenfell. Your character is given a small amount of money and a packet for delivery to an Imperial officer in the large city of Balmora, a trip of several days' distance by foot.

Morrowind's developers have good reason to pat themselves on the back over the game's introductory sequence. It serves several functions at once, and does all of them well. It gives you a visual and auditory sense of the gameworld. It supplies a tutorial to the interface, as each action you're requested to perform is accompanied by subtitles revealing the appropriate command. Finally, it furnishes an excellent roleplaying vehicle for character creation, as various people you meet (a slave, an officer, a bureaucrat) require you to select a name, race, sex, birthsign, and skills configuration. You can design a character using one of three methods, answering a series of ten questions (which may bring back nostalgic memories to old Ultima game veterans), choosing one of twenty-one pre-figured classes, or completely creating your own class from scratch.

While for some players the ten-questions method may seem the best roleplaying option for character creation, I admit to finding the questions themselves (based on what-if ethical decisions) frankly blunt and superficial. Each to their own; personally, I'd rather design a character's life in advance in my head, then work out the details of building a statistical persona that matches my imagined past. For me, creation-from-scratch in Morrowind was ideal, but be warned: to get reasonable results, you should read the manual and think carefully about what you want your newly birthed character to be. There is a lot of detail to cover: race, sex, birthsign and skills all will have major effects on anything you'll attempt in your future life. For example, the Breton race receives a boost to their magicka (that's the amount of magic they can store at any one time), an innate resistance to magic, several boosts to magical skills, and the ability to cast the Dragon Skin shield spell on themselves, once a day. Combine that with the Apprentice birth sign (a weakness to magicka that cancels out the Breton magic resistance, and a major increase in the amount of magicka you get), and you have the beginnings of a very respectable mage.

But don't feel limited to the tired AD&D stereotypes of fighter, thief, ranger, etc. Do you want your newbie mage to be experienced in wearing heavy armor, and wield an axe? They can, and without spellcasting penalties. Your fighter can wield a longsword, pick locks like a professional burglar, and cast spells of great destructive power. There are twenty-seven skills for various types of weaponry, armor, magic schools and stealth activities such as security (lockpicking, trap probing), speechcraft (successfully raising the disposition of NPCs you converse with) and sneak (go unseen; pickpocket; shoplift). Five are chosen to be major skills, with the highest ratings for your new character (on a scale of 1-100, they'll probably rate 35-45), five become minor skills, and the rest, with the lowest ratings, are miscellaneous skills. There are no restrictions on their ordering. In case you run out of ideas, the twenty-one pre-made classes that Morrowind offers for use (spellswords, assassins, pilgrims, healers, etc) give a pretty good idea of the range of options available, without exhausting the possibilities.

Skills rise with use, major and minor skills more so than miscellaneous ones. Effectively block with a shield in battle, for instance, and your Block skill will gradually increase. Each skill in turn is linked to one of eight attributes: Strength (carrying, fatigue, starting health, damage), Intelligence (total magicka), Willpower (resistance to magical attacks, fatigue), Agility (hitting and dodging attacks, fatigue), Speed (how fast you move while walking and running), Endurance (fatigue, health), Personality (how well you're liked and how much information people give you) and Luck -- which governs nothing, but I suspect acts like a combination Fairy Godmother and Murphy's Law, depending upon whether you've been blessed or cursed. Once you've raised any combination of your ten major and minor skills by ten points, your character makes a level. The next time they rest, you'll be given an opportunity to raise three of their six attributes by one point apiece. However, if you've especially used a set of skills related to a particular attribute since last leveling, you could end up being offered a multiplier for raising that attribute. Been working out those armorer, axe, blunt weapon, and/or longblade skills? Instead of gaining a single Strength point as your character sleeps, you could be offered a 3x multiplier, or even 5x.